My On-Campus Student Internships Celebration experience – by Claire Morgan 

As the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience I was pleased to see so many students and colleagues come together to celebrate the students who have embarked on an On-Campus Internship placement this summer.  

On 2 November, over 80 research exhibition posters were displayed at the sbarc | spark building, with more than 100 students attending, with the supervisors from their programme and several other staff members.  

Here at Cardiff University, we not only value the student perspective, we are committed to ensuring we work in partnership with our students. We want to empower our students to make authentic contributions to the high calibre research and scholarship that takes place here, and to have direct input into our learning and teaching practice.   

Since the launch in 2008 of our original placement scheme, CUROP (Cardiff University Undergraduate Research Opportunities scheme) we have supported over 1200 students with summer placements at Cardiff, investing over £1.5m in the student experience  

Following a 2-year pause during the pandemic, we were delighted to be able to run the scheme in full this summer.  

We have four strands to the programme that each give our students a unique experience working alongside university colleagues: 

• Research Internships (formally known as CUROP) 
• Learning and Teaching Internships (formally known as CUSEIP) 
• Professional Services Internships (formally known as CUIP) 
• Our new strand for 2022: Innovation Development Internships (formally known as CIDS) 

The changes to the way we work weaved its way through our placement scheme this summer, giving many of our students the opportunity to undertake a remote or blended placement. This can only strengthen their experience when looking for opportunities after completing their studies with us.   

We also offered our 2022 outgoing graduates the opportunity to complete a placement this summer as they had missed out during the 2-year pause. 

The celebration event was an opportunity for staff and students to delve a bit deeper into each other’s experiences and to find out about the various projects. 

Thank you 

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the supervisors and schools for the time they invest in hosting a placement over the summer. It is truly brilliant that our staff are passionate about the student experience and seek out opportunities to host a placement.  

I also want to thank our students for putting themselves forward for these opportunities and for investing so much of their effort into making the projects a success – the celebration event was a time to celebrate what you have achieved. 

I wish you all the best of luck this year and hope the experience you gained this summer will serve you well in your studies and beyond.  

Exhibition posters and lightning talks 

You can see from the exhibition the broad range of projects within this scheme – everything from ‘Wild swimming, wellbeing and waterscapes’ in the School of Social Sciences to ‘Materials for the future: recycling and self-healing concrete’ in the School of Engineering and ‘Evaluating gamified classroom activities using Virtual Reality Learning Environments in Computer Sciences and Healthcare Sciences.  

If you missed the event, you can view some of our students with their exhibition posters and the lightning talks presented at the event. 

Diolch yn fawr.